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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

If this is a thing that really matters, it wouldn't be that hard to build a competitor right?

It is as hard or easy as finding the right people. For reference, Amazon bought Twitch for about a billion dollars instead of trying to build it.

The competitor already exists and at least some people are already using it: PeerTube.

Run it yourself, and you can save whatever videos your community cares about for as long as you fucking feel like because YOU OWN IT. None of YouTube's asinine copyright strike bullshit to worry about -- if a company has a problem with your use of something they need to send you a real DMCA notice. None of Twitch's random policy change bullshit to worry about. No advertising. If your community actually gives a shit about the content then they will pitch in to pay for the hosting through Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, etc -- or mirror it themselves. Any streamer with a decent number of viewers will almost certainly have someone in the audience who is technically capable of running an instance if the streamer can't or doesn't want to DIY.

I get being on YouTube and Twitch -- PeerTube's discoverability sucks -- but for goodness sake, take ownership of your archives! If you make videos, that is your long tail! That is your legacy! Own it!

the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him

Of course. But we've seen it happen before. Digg had a huge lead on Reddit, angered the community enough that they left. Myspace v Facebook. Etc.

I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch purposefully doesn't even have one.

A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.

Yea, but, in addition, Twitch has a very expensive business to run. Video is orders of magnitude more data than pictures and audio which are itself magnitudes above text. The costs in your example are wildly different.

And the culture. Your examples are from the 2000s. The culture of the Internet back then was vastly different than it is today.

> A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.

I disagree. Where is this magic funds button? You're gonna need quite the pitch to get an investor to invest LOTS of money going up against Amazon (edit: and Google!).

It's been awhile since I was in that world, but I have to imagine that if you have a site whose traffic is growing at a good rate, you don't need to pitch that many investors. Some seed funding could get you enough runway to pay the AWS bills.

You very rarely hear of the startup who ran out of money because they had too much traffic.

> A skilled programmer

Running a massive video site is not as simple as throwing a bunch of skilled programmers at it...

Surely. But starting a streaming video site that gains traction and scales is easier now than when Twitch did it, I am sure.

That's exactly why Mixer failed to gain popularity, even after poaching streamers like Ninja from Twitch.

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